It’s fun to tease about Ayn Rand’s outspoken defense of the idea that human values are objective, and her tendency to explain her aesthetic preferences (tap dancing, for instance, or chess, or stamp collecting) in terms of human universals. I sometimes joke about it, too. But it’s worthwhile sometimes to pause and make sure we aren’t actually misleading people about what she said. And I fear that Nick Gillespie and others commenting on Rand’s statement, in a letter to the editor of Cat Fancy, that cats are objectively valuable, might be misleading in just this way. In fact, Rand was saying something that isn’t very controversial, and which is well supported by evidence.
What Rand meant when she said that values are objective (or that certain evils are objective) is that their value or disvalue is not a matter of convention—things that are good for us aren’t good just because we say so, and things that are bad aren’t bad just because we say so. Nutritious food is good for us, and poison bad, whether or not we realize it. The same, she believed, is true of more abstract values such as love, freedom, or art. The value that these things possess is not attributed, but can be assessed or measured by a process of thought that is, in principle, the same as the scientific process by which a doctor determines that one diet is good for you and another bad. The real philosophical controversy here is whether this sort of “good” and “bad” is the same sort of “good” and “bad” that’s at issue when we talk about actions or states of affairs. But Rand, like all Aristotelians, answers that question yes: it’s not just a matter of taste or habit, but a real fact that certain things cause humans to flourish, and flourishing is the standard of good. This last is, again, a time-honored argument in philosophy, and among Aristotelians, not controversial.
What Rand meant in saying that cats are an objective value is simply that the joy that pets bring us is not merely a matter of convention or subjective taste. Cats, dogs, and other pets bring us joy for reasons, so that there is an answer to the question of why we keep pets around; an answer other than “because I say so.” The joy we experience is itself valuable because it contributes to flourishing. That’s really not so odd an opinion at all when you say it that way; I suspect just about everyone agrees with it. The fact is even more obvious if you talk about pets who perform important work tasks. Would anyone imagine that a farmer’s dog is only valuable to him because he says so? No, of course not. His dog is a value to him for genuine, demonstrable reasons. The farmer can say “This dog is valuable to me because ___.” Rand, being a writer, would naturally find a cat better than a dog, for analogously objective (i.e., not merely attributive) reasons. And, in fact, evidence strongly substantiates the idea that pets are objective values.
Again, obviously this is just a fun sort of celebrity story. But there are many people out there who like to engage in the old horse laugh at the idea of objective values, and in particular ridicule the notion that something like pets can fit into a sophisticated philosophical framework. But saying cats are an objective value is actually not a particularly odd or controversial or funny thing to say.
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